Check it out!

In its colloquial use this phrase is quite typically associated with new things. It indicates something that is supposed to be unknown or was not (yet) perceived. There is also a social imperative behind this phrase, involving at least one person that has already “checked out” something and another who hasn‘t. Knowledge is handed down, spread and expanded. Yet there is another use which makes this common phrase all the more interesting. In the case of “checking a book out from a library”, for example, the initial recommendation is transformed into a proposition to act and to get hold of something.

“To check” is a Cybernetic metaphor

The placing of the word check here is indicative of an intrusion of cybernetic jargon into common speech. “Checking” is closely associated with surveillance and control, of safeguarding the proper functioning of a machine, a routine or an algorithm. The seemingly trivial remark adopts a whole new dimension pointing toward a cultural condition where the number of choices surpasses what the mind can reasonably and productively process. In the field of cultural production each enunciation exist first and foremost to be communicated at a given point in time. Because production is asynchronous (works on particular subjects) and simultaneous (different actors produce at the same time), continued attention to a multitude of subjects is difficult.

Dissonance and Consonance

Assuming that a given individual can only follow the development of a limited number of elements, “check it out” points to a hitherto unnoticed element and seeks to integrate it into the wider perceptive and interpretative framework. Elements that are excluded from a structure are reviewed and amended to establish consonance or can be rejected to uphold dissonance on firmer grounds. “Check it out“ remains an imperative and a cybernetic metaphor of cultural production. Any selection of elements remains to be expanded by further “checks” on available alternatives and variants. Identity thus established is a temporal marker.

Den Alltag dialektisch verstehen

Eine Frage der Ähre

Man stelle sich einen Hamster mit mittlerer Reife auf der Durchreise von Amsterdam nach Berlin vor, der an der Raststätte Garbsen vor Hannover einen Zwischenstopp einlegt. In froher Erwartung einiger frischer Getreidekörner betritt der Hamster in Begleitung seines Frauchens die Raststätte und muss feststellen: Es gibt nur Wasser! Und das ist bei aller Kundenorientierung der Mitarbeiter auch nur auf Nachfrage zu erhalten. Da er in Damenbegleitung ist, muss er sich der Nahrungsbeschaffung alleine widmen – nur Herrchen dürfen hier ihren Schutzbefohlenen zu Seite stehen.

Auch der etwas betagte Dalmatiner W., der gegen 9.30 Uhr in Begleitung der Familie M. aus G. in Garbsen ankommt, ist erschüttert. Hatte ihm die Grundschule und das Gymnasium bereits 12 Menschenjahre seines ohnehin kurzen Lebens geraubt, muss er jetzt zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass die freundlich-höfliche Anrede seiner Person nur darüber hinweg täuschen soll, dass auch für ihn hier an Wasser und Breckies nur „gedacht“ worden war, Taten sollten in unbestimmter Zeit folgen.

Stellen wir uns abschliessend also jene Person vor, an die sich dieses Schild eigentlich richtet – das Herrchen bzw. den Kunden in seiner Funktion als konsumierender Weltreisender, der zu jeder Zeit an jedem Ort der Autobahn eben jenen Komfort erwarten darf, den er in seiner unmittelbaren Lebensumgebung auch vorfindet. Schließlich ist er es, der, trotz aller Bemühungen demokratischer Bildungspolitik, von allen Mehrbeinern immer noch der einzige ist, der durch die Lektüre abstrakter Buchstaben (in den meisten Fällen) jene zu sinnvollen Worten zusammenfügen und (im besten Fall) auch verstehen kann.

Verstehen wir diese absurde Krönung von Kundenorientierung hier also richtig, müsste sich aus dem Geschriebenen eine Handlungsanweisung ergeben. Bleibt nur die Frage, wer hier handeln soll. Das „Herrchen“, das in absentia implizierte „Frauchen“ oder doch das Team aus Zwei- und Vierbeiner? Wir stellen uns also abschließend den mit Waffenschein ausgestatteten Rottweiler des ledigen Markus P. aus D. vor, der nach der Lektüre dieser Zeilen mit einem kühnen Sprung hinter die Theke des Raststätten-Shops – zu deutsch: Convenience Area – einen prekär beschäftigten Mitarbeiter in eine noch prekärere Lage bringt, indem er ihn durch eindeutiges Augenrollen und lautes Bellen AN DAS AUFFÜLLEN DER WASSERSCHÜSSEL ERINNERT.

PS: Beschwerden bitte an: Autobahn Tank & Rast GmbH,  Andreas-Hermes-Str. 7-9, 53175 Bonn. Telefon 0228/922-0, Email: kundenkontakt@serways.de

Human Patterns

Under the motto “Voir, Observer et Penser” the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris is currently exhibiting about 100 photos by German photographer August Sander (1876-1964). Sander is best known and admired for his work on human types, professions and social classes. His “People of the 20th century” is an attempt to give an image of the people of his time and stands at the center of his human typology. Directed against expressionism Sander employed photography to “create a universal language” by an “objective” image.

His photos show beggars and stars, peasants and artisans – people from all sides of society at the beginning of the 20th century. His magnum opus has been reissued in a collector’s edition of 7 volumes. The exhibit in Paris also features some of his little known landscape portraits of German rivers and mountain regions apart from botanical studies.

August Sander: Brethren, Westerwald (about 1918) Ⓒ Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur - August Sander Archiv, Köln

Characteristically, images are captioned with types of people rather than individual names. His concern lies with patterns in culture and how a social environment shapes posture and facial expression. A “factory owner” posing in tuxedo with his glitzy wife in front of a villa is juxtaposed with a “brick layer” – carrying bricks. His portrays are carefully crafted for each subject alike and allow space for self-reflection. Similar to his landscape studies of rivers, patterning is the overarching theme that he seeks to capture and objectify with his camera.

The problem with looking at such a typology at the beginning of the 21st century is to assume a perspective that is not by default self-referential. Hyper-mediatised as we are, it is difficult to look at an image of an individual and consider it as typical of a larger group. Where we are looking for self-expression and uniqueness, Sander’s photos upset this longing by defying individuality to the people depicted.

Backpackers by exactitudes

A similar focus of a human typology can by found in the Exactitudes project by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek from Rotterdam. This selection of hundreds of photographs, sorted by types of people and ways of clothing shows how consumer culture intensifies patterning: in clothes, hobbies, music styles and cultural preferences. The objective of typecasting might be a similar one here but in its editorial line, exactitudes underlines the uniformity of consumer culture in full conscience of its heterogeneity.

Descriptive Excess: Jacques Racière’s take on the Reality Effect

Politics of Aesthetics

Given that the height of French structuralist criticism has long passed away (along with its most prolific writers) the review by Jacques Rancière at the Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) on September 21 was a welcome chance for a couple of hundreds of people to review the “politics of fiction” through an analysis of 18th and 19th century Realist literature.

Starting with Roland Barthes’ classic “The Reality Effect” (1968), Rancière attempts to recapture the political impact of Realist fiction through its radical dismissal of boundaries, of high and low, of subjecting parts to an overarching idea. The “descriptive excess” of Realism, in his words, does not conflate high art and the profane passions of every day life, but affirms that in democratic literature all elements play an equal part in the construction of the text. Invoking Borges’ criticism of Proust (“There are just too many pages in his work!”), Rancière underlines that what a appears as a representation in a Realist novel, actually dissolves representation by putting all signifiers on an equal level. The Real is produced as an effect of the text itself and is not supported by an external reality.

… in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. (p.234)

(Roland Barthes “The Reality Effect” In: Dorothy J. Hale (2006) The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, London: Blackwell, pp. 230-234)

Rancière went on to point to the self-sufficiency of the realist description that self-consciously employs details and description to destabilize existing structures of power. By breaking the distinctions of class, of textual conventions, of conflating different media forms and images, Realist fiction does not so much produce reality as such, but offers “new possibilities of a sensory experience of equality”.

We might add a reference to the Constance School and Wolfgang Iser here to point to the democratic appeal of popular texts precisely because they need to be appropriated by a reader and are not in themselves meaningful.

Rancière has devoted a large part of his research to (re-) negotiations of space, of distribution and division in the legacy of Deleuze, and his more recent works summarize the “Politics of Aesthetics”. His defense of Realist fiction as a political art form might sound surprising. Whereas the Modernists rejected Realism on the grounds of its excessive logic of description, Rancière defends it. Realist fiction embodies a “self-contradiction of cause and effect” and follows a logic of addition (of details or images). Structuralists, Futurists, and Dadaists – in short the Modernist movement – on the other hand favored subtraction in painting, in writing and theater. Rancière emphasizes that Realist excess of description is an immanent criticism of cause and effect as a logical function of language itself. By placing signifiers on equal levels, Realism is the first truly democratic form of fiction and should not be dismissed as a mere representation. Without its representation, he contends, reality remains even more elusive.

This is not Ljubljana - but the ICI hinterland

Wie ein ZEIT-Artikel funktioniert

Leserkommentar von “nichtdasbild” zu einem ZEIT-Artikel über Bücher, die das Sterben thematisieren. Der Aufmacher, Christoph Schlingensiefs Buch über seine Krebserkrankung, ist nicht nur Aufmacher sondern auch Symptom eines wirtschaftlichen, also gesellschaftlichen Phänomens. Wird im Artikel allerdings nur mit einem Link gewürdigt. Drauf reingefallen und die Clickrate erhöht.

clipped from www.zeit.de Im übrigen gilt das Gleiche für Journalisten, die aus beliebigen Meldungen gleich ein gesellschaftliches Phänomen stanzen. Es ist überhaupt keine Leistung irgendetwas zu einem Symptome der Gesellschaft aufzublähen: das tut jeder Bauarbeiter, den ich nach den Ursachen von Überstunden befrage.

Printed periodicals in decline in Japan

The Japan Newspaper Publishers & Editors Association (NSK) reports a slow decline of printed periodicals in Japan for 2008. See this quote for the most recent figures.

clipped from www.pressnet.or.jp By type of publication, sales of books fell 2.7 percent to \458.1 billion and sales of magazines dropped 5.2 percent to \530.5 billion. Among magazines, sales of monthly publications fell 4.6 percent to \410.5 billion, while sales of weekly magazines dropped 7.1 percent to \120.1 billion. The rate of return of unsold copies was up 0.9 of a percentage point to 39.0 percent for books and up 0.3 of a percentage point to 36.9 percent for magazines.